


Feather Molt

by herrenjaller (orphan_account)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fallout, Child Neglect, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-25 23:00:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13223040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/herrenjaller
Summary: Prompto is a synthetic child, raised up in the wasteland.-Lucis was dead. Its trees grew no leaves. Its earth struggled to produce anything but the most desperate of weeds. Its people were dirty. The water was poison. The land screamed and clicked with radiation. Every speck and mote and pile of Lucis was scarred by a war two-hundred years passed.Characters and tags updated as revealed/needed ❤





	Feather Molt

**Author's Note:**

> Bear and bundle along with me, this one's for exposition and establishing.

He didn’t remember being born. Didn’t remember a beginning. There wasn’t even the haze and fog of a memory that had forgotten its beginning. No, it was a sudden and fractious snap when things just _were_. Mom; brown haired and brown eyed, and tan-skinned from spending all day tending the weak stalks of the tatos. Dad; black haired and green eyed and always so tired. And Prompto. Flaxen hair and eyes so blue they made the sunshine ache, covered in cranberry freckles and perpetual sunburn. Not their son.

When Prompto got a cold, there were no hugs. Mom would look at his eyes, inspect his ears with an otoscope, hold his tongue down with the rough pad of her finger (no sense in wasting a good depressor that could be used for splinting a finger), and shoo him off to wait for an injection. He caught her taking notes once. When he asked, she’d given him a sideways look and pushed him away.

They weren’t patient, and they weren’t generous, but Prompto was quiet. Or he learned to be. The first year, age twelve, was the harshest.

* * *

His start, the not-beginning beginning of things, was all wrapped and tangled in a network of white and silver rooms and halls. There were green trees there, and clear water. The people had gentler, softer hands than Mom or Dad. They’d talked to him. He could ask questions, and they’d smile, and they’d answer. Needles and finger-prodding didn’t bother so much when you were first warned, and gently patted after. They had bandages there - not needed, though, with how quick he healed. There were a few times, times he remembered spottily, where they had cut him only to watch his skin knit back together. He could heal quick, they’d mutter, but not too quick. Too quick would arouse suspicion. Too quick and the ‘wasteland crockpots get itchy fingers’.

There was a man with a steep widow’s peek who had apologized on the days they exercised his tolerances. How long until he felt hunger? How long until his mouth felt dry? Did this hurt? No? Well what about this? When he’d been sobbing, crying, screaming for it to please stop, they had apologized. He remembered being held, having music played while he sat, petting the fur of a plush toy. Sniffling. Feeling the aches and burns subside from his body. He hadn’t been called Prompto then. He’d been a project code.

Those few weeks of cleanliness, of clinicians and scientists and questions - it ended too quickly.

He’d take the testing back, he would, if it meant he could sleep without twitching awake at every click and creak of the world around him.

On the day he left- No, on the day he was _taken_ , there was a woman in black. She was a sharp relief against all the white walls and fluorescent lights. She held his hand.

Prompto stared up at her. “You have a gun.”

“You have freckles,” the woman said. She crouched in front of him. Her eyes were narrow, and her dark hair was only half managing to stay in the sloppy bun she’d pinned it into. “But you’ve never been in the sun. How’s that happen, kid?” She smiled and squeezed his hand. “They tell you where you’re going?”

“Lucis.”

“What’s left of it, yeah. They tell you why?”

“I have a family.”

Her lips drew into a thin line. She nodded. “Anything else?”

“A lot of things, but-“

“But never enough, right? I know.” She squeezed his hand again. “Now I want you to look at me. There’s going to be a loud noise, but don’t be afraid. I’ve got you.”

“What’s your name?” Prompto followed as she stood and walked them through the halls. Her shoes clicked with her steps, and she had to lean the slightest bit to hold his hand. She didn’t answer him.

“It’s going to be bright, so when I say close your eyes, you listen. There’s gonna be a lot of new stuff, they tell you that?” Her coat shifted, and he saw her gun in the holster at her hip. A flash of silver in her boot caught his eye. Another gun, smaller, impossibly so, tucked away.

He looked up and found her waiting, brows raised. He nodded.

She stepped with him into a dimly lit room. Clinicians milled about at monitors and desks. A few waved to them as they entered, smiling bright and wide at Prompto. His palms slicked with sweat, but the woman didn’t pull away. She led him to the center of the room, stepping up onto a wide steel panel. The panel was circular, and as Prompto stepped onto it beside her, blue lights flickered to life beneath them.

“Remember,” she said, “it’s going to be loud, and it’s going to be bright. Keep your eyes closed, kiddo. It’ll be over before you know it’s happened.”

The air thrummed. The steel plate beneath them wobbled, as though heat rippled from it, but Prompto was cold. His skin rose in gooseflesh. The woman knelt, poked him in the bridge of his glasses. Prompto closed his eyes. His eyelashes butted against his lenses, made him scrunch his nose. A shudder of thunder rolled down through him, and with a flash of twisting heat, the air changed.

His first breath felt sticky. His second felt too-big.

As the ringing in his ears quieted, he heard the woman speaking to him. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she whispered, just by his ear. She’d gotten so close, half holding him as if to shield. “You can open your eyes. Look around. This is Lucis.”

* * *

Dad, at least, had been warm when they’d welcomed him. He’d shown Prompto his little corner of the ramshackle farmhouse. He got a bed. Mom and Dad slept on a pile of moldy mattresses they’d cushioned with animal hides and bedrolls. The bed creaked. When the woman with the guns watched him test it with his hand, she tried not to laugh at how he jumped at the squealing of the springs.

His parents were a pair of surfacers. They were doing agricultural reconnaissance and additional testings of water, air quality, and this new child they were saddled with.

The woman with the guns stayed that first night. They ate crisped cubes of meat that made Prompto’s stomach turn.

There was no green here, and the water was brown. And when he threw up every dry and burnt bit of his dinner, she rubbed his back. “I know, kid. I know.”

“Do I have to stay?” His throat burned. His eyes watered. Everything stung like a hundred thousand needles. The air was thick and it hurt to breathe. And the great, big ceiling over it all was such a dark and sickly green.

Her hand paused, and after a long moment where Prompto heard only his own sobbing and hiccoughing, she sighed. “Yeah.”

He heard her speaking with his parents late into the night, their voices only the bare murmur of whispers. The window beside his bed showed stretches of dead scrub for miles and miles. Nothing but the tips of trees broke the horizon. He folded his glasses and put them on the windowsill. Dark as the ceiling outside was, it was poked with dots of lights. Pinks and greens, and bright, pale blues. The white halls hadn’t had that.

* * *

A week was long enough to learn the _ceiling_ was the sky, that the poking dots were stars, and that Lucis was dead. Its trees grew no leaves. Its earth struggled to produce anything but the most desperate of weeds. Its people were dirty. The water was poison. The land screamed and clicked with radiation. Every speck and mote and pile of Lucis was scarred by a war two-hundred years passed.

* * *

When he was fifteen, he watched Mom drag a bed frame, squealing springs and all, into her home. Not their home, not Prompto’s home. He had his corner, with a torn-up rug and his bed and a small pile of things. Dad had once brought back two King’s Knight comics, each missing pages and corners abound. He’d grinned as he handed them to Prompto. Dad was really the better of the two, if Prompto had to pick. Dad did the trading though, did the traveling and the trekking.

Mom brought her own sort of peace. By the time he was sixteen, Prompto could read her well enough. She was surface, all on her face, and she was honest. She wasn’t going to tell this child she loved him. She wasn’t going to tell him that dinner would be ready, when the crop had died a week earlier and there was nothing to be hunted or fished.

Every now and again, someone would come in a great flash of that burning light the woman with the guns had warned Prompto of. There would be a crash, worse than thunder, and then someone would knock on the door. They came during storms, most often. By the time he was seventeen, he realized it was to hide the light and the sound. You didn’t talk about those people. You didn’t talk about the white halls or the green trees. No stories of testing, or questions about people in black leather with guns. That gets you killed, Mom told him. She wrapped his wrist in a paisley black bandana. “Never take that off. Never.” Mom was honest. And Prompto was quiet.

* * *

 

At eighteen, he offered to leave, to go hunt or trade or do _something_ , and he’d never seen Mom tell him “No” so certainly or suddenly. She whipped around in her chair to look at him, crossed legged on his bed, hair a greasy, tousled mess.

When he’d come to this little farmhouse, nestled amongst fields of tatos and razorgrain, with a brahmin that mooed like a broken toy, he had been fat and round, and pink-cheeked. Lucis was thin for food though. Or at least the farm was, and he’d shed the weight fast as he came into his puberty. The only clean thing in the house was the scale that Mom made him step onto each morning and each night. He’d stopped looking at the number on the ticking dial after the third week of it. Every week she measured his height, and when he was taller than her, and she had to stand on her tip-toes, he had laughed. She was a tiny woman. Dad would have done better to do the measuring, but she always called him clumsy. If they’d truly been his parents, Prompto might’ve said that’s where he got it from. But he’d called himself her son once, and she had stared at him.

Empty. Not cold, but not warm either. The way a bird looks at the ground, when it hears stirring under the surface and is deciding where to tear open the earth with its beak.

* * *

He was twenty. He was cold. He was freezing.

Prompto followed the eyebot. It sang. Bobbing and dipping through the air, its song was a tinny, too-far radio frequency of lilting orchestral arrangements. Snow had started to fall last night. A thick and powdery fall that stifled all the noise of the Lucian wasteland. Here and there were the echoes of gunshots, sure, and once he’d been certain that the howling he heard wasn’t a dog, but instead one of those pickle-skinned stags. But it was quiet. Ear-ringing, lung-burning quiet.

Mom was gone. Dad was dead, maybe. The farm was flattened. The raiders would take the middling crop, eat it, and be done with it. When Prompto had run, shitty pipe pistol tucked inside his jacket and a pocketful of .38 rounds, he hadn’t looked back. The raiders had laughed. Raucous, drunk, wild laughter. They shot the ground behind him, made him jump and yelp before he veered hard into the cover of trees. He heard them fire on the brahmin before he was much further.

Raiders. Lazy ones too. They’d come in the daylight, hands up and offering to trade before he’d seen them, from the window of his room, draw up and fire. He’d slammed through the back door. Sprinted. Didn’t look to see if Dad was still standing. Didn’t scream for Mom. Just ran.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> Next chapter brings some actual story and interaction ❤
> 
> Comments and Kudos are greatly appreciated! 
> 
> Come hang out with me on social media! 
> 
> [Tumblr](http://valhethella.tumblr.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/cuteleesi/) | If you enjoy my work, a [ko-fi](http://ko-fi.com/A43229I) is always much appreciated


End file.
